


Means Don't Leave Me Here Alone

by Snowfilly1



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley Has Self-Esteem Issues (Good Omens), First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Post-Scene: The Ritz (Good Omens), Slow Burn, Snake Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21944062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowfilly1/pseuds/Snowfilly1
Summary: Love meant not being alone, and that’s what Crowley offered, what he received in that moment with the streetlights shining a halo around them.Crowley knows that his home is with Aziraphale. They'll find their way there eventually. A look at a few milestones along the way. Post show.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 130





	Means Don't Leave Me Here Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DaydreamingofDragons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaydreamingofDragons/gifts).



> Merry Christmas and happy holidays, all of you wonderful people in GO fandom. Keep being awesome. 
> 
> And especially Merry Christmas to my dearest DayDreamingofDragons. I know the 'Crowley gets confused about what home means' fic i promised you turned into an angst fest, so here's one where Crowley knows exactly where his home is; it might just take a little while to get there.

It was, Crowley thought afterwards, all rather inevitable. 

Maybe not from the Garden, not even from a church in ruins under a noisy blanket of air raid sirens and anti-bomber strafing, but certainly from the day the world hadn’t ended. A lunch at the Ritz which turned into dinner at the Ritz, which turned into a walk home in the starlight. 

And if he’d made the stars shine a little brighter, pulled the clouds away from a few he’d made so they shone even brighter for his angel, well…Aziraphale was the only person who might have noticed a small miracle and said something about it, and he’d had other things on his mind. Like walking close enough to Crowley so that their hands brushed together, three times in the space of a few minutes when it had never happened in all the millennia of their friendship. 

Like doing them both the favour of pretending that he didn’t hear Crowley’s muffled gasp when he finally dropped the pretence, and clasped his hand.

He’d known then, in the real way - the way that cut through all the shadows in the mind, the broken glass edges of his thoughts - that Aziraphale loved him. 

Another three streets to cross, feet finding their way unguided down roads they knew deep down in memory. Bodies controlling their actions, every scrap of their minds focussed on what skin felt like against skin; soft, bookish, reader’s hands pressed against heat rough, heart beat rough, starmaker’s fingers. A perfect fit where there had previously only been missing parts. 

He knew then, and for the few minutes, the eternity, of their walk home, that Aziraphale thought and felt the same as him. Felt their joined pulse through fingertips, a ceaseless and un-needed heartbeart of ‘yes, this. Yes, this, at last. Yes.’

A prayer and an offering and a benediction, something so blasphemous that even a demon should have turned away from it. Something so right that to turn away would be to deny every atom of his twisted forms, all their tangled essences. 

And Aziraphale had turned to him in the soft glow of the last streetlight, the last homely place, and pulled him to a standstill. Glanced down at the twined mess of their fingers, and pulled him closer. 

Always pulled. Crowley, starmaker, understood the pull of attraction, the law of it, more than any other who lived or thought; had understood from the Garden that Aziraphale pulled his heart to closeness and obedience and desire as strongly as the stars of Alpha Centurai pulled to each other. Cold hurt his soul, music pleased his ears, Aziraphale called to him and said ‘stay with me, stay with me,’ and they were some of the laws of this plane. 

And today, the day they weren’t supposed to have, had become the day he didn’t have to fight against that law. To resist. So, he stepped across the pool of shadows on the pavement and pushed himself into waiting arms (see that? See? I came to you, like I had in my dreams, like I always wanted, as you asked me to since forever, because you knew we’d end up here), and Aziraphale had held him. 

Not alone. Not alone. That’s what love is, and that was what Crowley learnt in that second, with their mismatched bodies, and strange eyes, and all their million differences fused into a completeness that just said, ‘this is us, nameless, new, this is us.’ Love meant not being alone, and that’s what he offered, what he received in that moment with the streetlights shining a halo around them. 

They both said it, the word tripping lightly from their tongues. What could be easier, freer, a carol for another new beginning, than that word?

‘Love.’

‘Love.’

‘Yes. Love.’

‘Love. You.’

Nonsense syllables for something so profound. For something that ought to shake mountains in their ground, and comets in their guarding circles, and all of Heaven and Hell and Earth. But they said it and nothing changed. (Voicing a secret at last does not change the secret, and this one had only been secret in that they’d never breathed it aloud; they’ve spoken it a thousand times with gestures and actions and ‘I thought you might like’s’).

‘Not here, angel,’ and he’d directed that mostly into the crook of Aziraphale’s neck. ‘Home,’ which he meant the bookshop, sort of, and the couch with the warm blanket that Aziraphale kept for when he visited, and most of all, somewhere where he could see Aziraphale could see him. He thought, in all the wide universe, under Aziraphale’s storm-sea-opal gaze would be home wherever they stood. 

‘No,’ and the darkness gave around them as they walked back. 

That evening was inevitable as well, in its sweetness and rightness. Crowley hoped and longed and burnt; things that he knew from films and shows, from spending so long amongst humans, things that Aziraphale offered with a smile. 

(He checked first. ‘I want everything, angel. Everything of whatever this is.’ ‘Yes, of course. Everything.’) And they both heard the ‘at last, I’ve got you,’ under that. 

Checked because it had to be everything; he’s lasted on scraps and fragments for six thousand years. He wants to be sated, full, even if it’s only once; snakes can last a long time after gorging, after all. But he doesn’t want to. Thinks he’s allowed to hope, just this once. 

And…it hadn’t happened. 

They’d kissed and talked and drank, passing bottles backwards and forwards so the necks still held the warmth of each other’s lips, and Crowley had pushed him alongside Aziraphale and the world didn’t end. 

It slipped away instead, one second to the next; Aziraphale’s fingers threading through his hair, sunlight soft (Crowley could only think of him in terms of elements, the power behind the gentleness; a nuclear reactor dialled back to the first promise of spring) and then blackness. 

Came back a timeless time later, another eternity, and how many eternities can fit into one day? A lot, apparently, if that day is the day that should have been the last one. Aziraphale is shaking his shoulder. 

‘Crowley, dearest, wake up.’

Why? He doesn’t want to go home; it’s dark and cold, the couch is longer than when he laid down and there’s a blanket. Comfort, safety, almost home. 

‘Come to bed with me.’

Not pulling, not this time; just temptation. Mirror of himself and his actions; how could he not recognise it?

They sleep together in the most literal sense; a tangle of limbs and souls, under a blanket that didn’t exist before Crowley collapsed onto the bed. Ginger fire hair a blaze against the pillows; exhausted bodies an ache and a comfort against each other. He hadn’t known tiredness could drag like this. 

He doesn’t dream. His dream, cloud soft, seaglass rounded, is with him, their tired and careless bodies jumbled together. 

Things change and don’t change. It takes time to wake up; he sleeps for nine days, dark to light to dark again, and the world stays not ended. Of course it does. It has Aziraphale watching over it. 

(Aziraphale watches over him. He hears whispers of books, read aloud, in his sleep. Poems recited. Things that say, again and again, ‘yes.’ ‘Yes.’)

It takes time for them to find themselves again; to become Crowley and Aziraphale instead of Nanny and Gardener, instead of agents of the Apocalypse. Easier to do that without adding another new identity to the list; Aziraphale-and-Crowley. He’s only partly a snake, can only shed so much of himself in one go. 

But it is inevitable, they both know. In the way he sometimes borrows Aziraphale’s jacket and lays it across his shoulders when it’s cold and they’re eating together; in the way Crowley takes off his shirt one day and stands bare chested, waiting for Aziraphale to comment on the scales that twine and star around his ribs and is greeted with ‘oh, my dear, they are beautiful. Can I touch them?’ In the way they sit together. 

(Sometimes, two stars will fall into each other’s orbits, pulled closer and closer together until they collide. Crowley never meant for that to happen, but he doesn’t mind it this once. His star is so warm and kind and loving; the collision will be the sweetest thing he’s ever known. He knows this, in the way he knows he is home, laying with his head Aziraphale’s lap.)

One evening in November, he finds the courage to lay wholly across Aziraphale on the couch. They fit like this as well; even when Aziraphale says softly ‘my darling.’ Even when shock betrays him; sideswipes him into an older, truer form and a red bellied snake coils across the angel’s lap, and is greeted with ‘my darling serpent,’ they fit. He knows then, as well, they will be lovers soon. 

It doesn’t happen at Christmas. There are new things and bright things, old ceremonies ghosting through the rituals he doesn’t quite know. Easy enough to misstep in their dance through it all, even without that added in. Except that missteps here are easily dealt with; laughter and soft words, soft hands to hold, and pressure of fingers against his cheeks; hands that touch his face but never his glasses until bravery shoots through him one morning and closes Aziraphale’s fingers around them. 

‘You can take them off, if you like.’ It is not a misstep; it is another part of the inevitable. Ceding control. Ceding self loathing ‘you see these horrible parts of me? I can’t change them for you. I am only me, this is all I have.’

It is easier than the scales, because it is already known. 

It is the hardest, bravest thing this demon has ever done. This is me. This is all of me, and it is yours. All the broken bits, all the mistakes, all the things I have kept hidden and all the things they hurt me with; it is yours and I trust you. 

Fingers tangle around his. ‘No, darling. Only if you want me to. Only ever if you want.’

He pushes a kiss against Aziraphale’s mouth, a kiss of gratitude and understanding. The kiss is taken from him; the glasses are not. 

They spend Christmas together and New Year. Fireworks paint the sky like stars, and Aziraphale is the stars and the moon and the world to him, and if asked before, he would have said waiting would be intolerable, but it is sweet and right.

Mead, honey, lavender, chocolate, crepes sweet. Sweet as Aziraphale’s mouth, sea breeze kind just like his fingers through Crowley’s red banner hair, as right as the bookshop and the Bentley and Queen. 

And because it is inevitable, there is a day which, although he looks back on it over centuries, over millennia, he never does learn why it was that day. There is nothing different, nothing special, except that he has Aziraphale and they have all the time in the world, so everything is special. 

But there is a day when Aziraphale’s kisses spill lower down his throat, when Crowley’s hands find skin hidden by layers, and he knows, they both know, and their words are mingled again, ‘Yes,’ and ‘yes please,’ and ‘more,’ and ‘yes.’ 

It’s reclaiming his Grace, it’s Falling, it’s making stars again except only for Aziraphale. It is sweet and right and theirs, at once a coming home and the start of a journey that will take them all the rest of time. Inevitable. 

A nightingale sings that evening in Soho, and the world carries on, the same except for the lovers who hold each other in their wings and so everything has changed. He has, they have, come home.

**Author's Note:**

> I stole an odd couple of lines from Neil Gaiman's poetry, 'Love means not being left alone' is paraphrased from Dark Sonnet.
> 
> The last homely...light is Tolkien. I'm sure Crowley's heard enough Tolkien read aloud to know about Rivendell.


End file.
